Storybook has an MCP. Figma has an MCP. Zeroheight has an MCP. It’s a constant drip of messaging. Announcing it, leading with it.
We have an MCP.
We have an MCP.
We have an MCP.
Procurement teams talk about it as a qualifying feature. The word itself is talked about as if it’s a feature.
It isn’t one.
I have an MCP. It has a cloud-based instance. You can hit it right now. It’ll pass all your tests. It’s fully compliant with MCP Inspector. Integrate it with any client.
It returns an empty object on every call. It has a zero toolset.
It’s useless. I built it as a thought experiment.
Because an MCP server is not a product. It’s a protocol.
A really useful protocol. One that this industry has converged on with exceptional speed.
But a protocol is a contract about how things plug into other things. It says nothing about what’s being plugged in. The protocol is an invitation, but if you accept it then you should have something to say.
The MCP protocol doesn’t ask where the data comes from. It doesn’t say anything about what to do if sources contradict. It doesn’t say if its payload is authoritative or based on junk.
None of that is in the MCP spec. None of it has to be true to ship an MCP. But those are the only things that matter about whether that MCP is worth connecting to.
Having an MCP isn’t that much different from saying you have a GitHub repo. It can be empty, it can be filled with junk, it can be filled with excellence.
I’ve argued at Knapsack to de-emphasize our MCP in our conversations.
The moment the term gets into the conversation, you get stuck in a comparative argument. A buyer can say “So does Storybook. So does Figma. What’s special about you having an MCP?”
At Knapsack I’ve been watching our IPE reconcile parallel implementations of a component, and surfacing where the disagreements are. Figuring out how sources coexist when they contradict. Normalizing those intakes into a consistent design system schema.
That’s the kind of work that’s valuable. We can serve that work through a protocol. But the protocol doesn’t have any opinions.
Products do.
Further reading:
Article photo by Craftsman Concrete Floors on Unsplash.